Abstract: A substantial body of research has shown that individuals with social anxiety disorder, as well as adolescents with elevated levels of social anxiety, exhibit an attentional bias toward negative facial expressions, highlighting the crucial role of attentional bias in social interaction. Although most existing studies have focused on socially anxious populations, the current study aims to investigate how attentional bias relates to interpersonal functioning and its potential underlying mechanisms in typically developing adolescents. To this end, the present study targeted a sample of typically developing adolescents, examining their attentional biases toward negative and positive emotional stimuli in two formats: facial expressions and text.
A total of 60 adolescents without clinical symptoms of anxiety participated in the study. Based on their level of interpersonal competence, they were classified into three groups: low, medium, and high, with 20 participants in each group. All participants completed two eye-tracking experiments, with the order of tasks counterbalanced across individuals. In Experiment 1, a dot-probe paradigm was used to assess attentional bias toward emotional faces across different competence groups. The participants were presented with pairs of emotional (negative or positive) and neutral faces, followed by a target stimulus appearing in the location of one of the faces. They were instructed to respond to the target as quickly as possible. In Experiment 2, a sentence reading task was employed to assess attentional bias toward emotional text. The participants were instructed to read sentences (negative, positive, or neutral) naturally and make accuracy judgments on comprehension questions presented after a subset of the sentences.
Experiment 1 revealed that adolescents with different levels of interpersonal competence showed their own characteristic patterns in emotional face processing. Specifically, results indicated a general attentional bias toward negative faces among adolescents. However, with respect to vigilance and temporal dynamics, each interpersonal competence group exhibited its own characteristic profile: individuals with low interpersonal skills exhibit reduced sensitivity to negative facial expressions, whereas those with moderate or high interpersonal competence can rapidly detect and process these expressions. For positive faces, the low-competence group showed sensitivity and re-engagement tendencies, the medium-competence group displayed no clear bias, and the high-competence group demonstrated rapid engagement and stable processing patterns. Experiment 2 revealed that only the high-competence group exhibited an attentional bias toward negative textual information. By contrast, attentional patterns for positive text mirrored those found in the facial expression task across all groups.
Overall, individuals with different levels of interpersonal competence demonstrate their own characteristic patterns of attentional bias. In addition, the high-competence group demonstrated greater cross-modal stability, whereas the low- and medium-competence groups showed more stable attentional patterns toward positive stimuli and more context-dependent patterns in response to negative stimuli. This study contributes to understanding the prevalence and developmental significance of emotional attentional bias among adolescents. Moreover, it reveals differential stability of attentional bias across emotional valences and ability groups, offering novel insights into the relationship between emotional attention mechanisms and interpersonal competence in typically developing adolescents.

Key words: adolescents, interpersonal competence, attentional bias, eye tracking